Home Sales To Cost York Residents

Tax Mark-up Market

July 31, 2005|By KIMBALL PAYNE Daily Press

Homeowners are watching York County homes sell and resell and worrying about how high their taxes will go as a result.

Helen Fazenbaker was in her front yard weeding last month when a minivan eased to a stop in front of her two-story brick home near Tabb Middle School. A woman jumped out of the van, ambled up to Fazenbaker and made her pitch.

"She just asked if we'd sell them our house," Fazenbaker said. "They just liked the looks of it."

The woman left her name, address and phone number, but Fazenbaker and her husband aren't quite ready to sell.

Home prices are rising throughout Hampton Roads, and one of the hottest markets is York County, known for good schools, low crime rates and reasonable tax rates. County assessors are in neighborhoods now laying the groundwork for this winter's reassessments.

The assessors use sale prices to help them determine how much to value a house for tax purposes, and based on sales prices in the county, residents expect to pay a lot more in real estate taxes.

"It's a surprise when you get the little piece of paper," Fazenbaker's neighbor, Mildred Benet, said of the reassessment notices.

This spring, investors bought the home next-door to Benet, put down new carpeting, painted it, added a few other amenities and resold it in less than a month, pulling in almost $60,000 more than they paid. Benet knows what that sort of increase means.

"It's nice that the price is going up," she said. "But then you have to pay the taxes."

The market is so hot that assessments are likely to be outdated before they even get sent out, said Tim Meyer, a real estate agent who sells houses mostly in York.

"The assessments still aren't keeping up," Meyer said. "When they give them out at the end of the year, they'll still be 10 to 20, maybe even 30 percent below the market value."

The buzz around the local housing market has even stretched to Manhattan, Meyer said. Last year, a businessman from New York City called his office and eventually bought 20 acres of waterfront property.

The rush on homes has been a boon for some homeowners, like Joseph Mahr, who bought a home in Kiln Creek in 1997.

A commander in the Coast Guard, Mahr is moving to Washington, D.C., for his next assignment and trying to sell his three-bedroom house himself.

"Housing prices are on the silly side," he said.

"None of these houses are worth what they're getting, and that's the problem -- they're getting it."

Like many people around the county, Mahr is wondering how long prices can keep going up.

"That is the national question right now," Mahr said. "I'm doubling my money in seven years. You can't do that without great risk."

With just a sign out front and a small classified add, Mahr said he has received at least two or three phone calls and about one visit every day.

Prices are up throughout the county.

David Fountain knew the house across the street from his home in the Lightfoot area sold twice in the past few years, but he had no idea that the second time around the seller bumped the price up more than $80,000.

Fountain bought his home in northern York County in 1996, but he hasn't thought too much about real estate since then.

"I plan on staying here for a while," he said.

"I've got kids and grandkids, but it might be just plain laziness. Why not try and fix it up and make it a home instead of for profit?"

Down the street from Fountain, the Sluss family is equally entrenched in large part because their four kids are thriving in York schools.

When they moved into the neighborhood a decade ago, all the houses seemed like a bargain, mostly because they were used to the notoriously overpriced market in Boston.

"Here, you could get a brand new town house instead of a rundown three-room apartment," Nancy Sluss said. "If we ever sold our house, we probably couldn't afford to live around here anymore. We'd have to move out to New Kent or something like that."

For Fountain, Sluss and many other homeowners, the rising prices and higher taxes are a reality of settling in York.

"You get it, you (complain) about it, you pay it and you forget about it," said Fred Satterwhite, who's lived in the same house in Queens Lake for more than 40 years.

"If you asked me right now what (my assessment) was I couldn't tell you."

But the spike in assessments has shocked even some real estate pros, including county assessor Greg Thacker.

"I've been appraising property for 26 years," he said, "and I've never seen anything like this."

The last time that the county reassessed property, in early 2004, the complaints were louder than usual, prompting the county Board of Supervisors to cut the county's tax rate and ask an outside group to make sure the assessments were on target.

The International Association of Assessing Officers audit recently reported that the assessments were accurate.

With assessments likely to rise throughout the county again, some supervisors are mulling another rate cut.